This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the The Fall of the House of Usher fanmade scenario by The Beard for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
Based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher has the investigators heading to a crumbling cursed manor to check on a friend of Dr. Armitage's, only to confront the generational evils haunting it. The scenario is a race - with the doom clock being your primary enemy, and the house crumbling around you as it passes.
The Fall of the House of Usher is a tightly paced scenario - as doom gets added, it causes locations to accumulate damage, and flip over to alternate sides. These alternate sides can make treacheries more difficult, sometimes have negative effects, and sometimes even beneficial ones, causing the map to rapidly shift. The encounter cards aren't terribly threatening, but they don't want to make this easy - most of the tracheries will in some way slow you down, like by causing you to drop clues or giving you a penalty to skills, while the monsters are not damaging, but are persistent and difficult to deal with and can even add doom if not dealy with quickly. All of this leads to a scenario where the biggest threat feels like the house collapsing down around you - you have a limited time to do what needs to be done, and it's running out fast, with literal representations of it every time a location flips over. The scenario finishes with a unique way to handle a final boss monster that opens up multiple paths to participation, depending on what your group composition is.
With the locations accumulating damage to flip over, it feels like there's a lot to track at first, although it does tend to go smoothly. It helps that the enemies are fairly basic - each requiring some different thought as to how they'll be handled, but none with particularly complicated rules. Even the treacheries that stick around are fairly easy to keep track of, ensuring that the mental load is never too taxing.
With two 19 XP investigators, I found Fall of the House of Usher on the easier side with a fast set-up. However, many of its mechanics will snowball, and characters who require too much setup or are vulnerable to an unlucky pull might cause problems - the faster you can hit the ground running, the better time you'll have. Requiring multiple assets in play can quickly cause you to be overwhelmed and start bleeding clues and actions, quickly getting bogged down and leading to a negative experience. The standalone chaos bag is also quite nasty, with two -4s, a -5, and a -6 on Standard, so running this scenario in a campaign should be much easier.
The Fall of the House of Usher is a unique scenario that poses a novel, fun challenge - but be ready to tackle it quickly, or have your plans fall apart as quickly as the house does.
Rewards
XP Cost: 2 XP
Potential XP Gain: 4 (locations) +1 (The Thing From the Tarn) = 5 XP or 3 XP after costs
Succesfully completing the scenario earns the Faded Silhouette for one investigator, a permanent card that starts each scenario by shuffling Madeline Usher into the encounter deck - and when draw, she allows each player to draw a card (and not get an encounter card this turn!)
One of two versions of The Mad Trist can be found in the scenario, and if the scenario is completed, kept. Both are two cost hand-slot assets with four secrets.
The Mad Trist (Dragon's Cunning) gives +1 to Intellect and Agility, and as an action you can spend a secret to move two clues from connecting locations to your location, ignoring attacks of opportunity for this action and your next investigate this round.
The Mad Trist (Shelter from the Storm) gives +1 to Willpower and Combat, and as an action allows you to spend a secret to move to a connecting location and heal a damage and a horror from an investigator or ally there, and does not provoke an attack of opportunity in doing so.